A no-nonsense genre like punk shouldn't really bother itself with yes-nonsense stuff like intros. Punk songs should slam right in. Most do. A few don't.

Phil's nominated "Smash It Up" by the Damned already, which I'd never heard (the intro, I mean: basically a completely different and rather wet song, nothing like the rousing, ridiculous anthem itself). He also mentions Black Flag.

Here's three others:

Fanfare-knell-salvo, warning of tempestuous darkness to come. The whole song is almost symphonic in its glowering grandeur, but that intro makes me think of Beethoven's 5th.

Were The Only Ones punk? Not really, but "Another Girl Another Planet" belongs to that moment and it has one of the most thrilling ignition / take-off bits of that or any other time, eclipsing the song itself (great as it is).

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Can't be the clearing house for non-blog-owning entities just yet, owing to commitments over the holiday season. For now, a few suggestions of my own.

Lovely darkly shimmering bit at the start of this Roxy:

Aerosmith had a penchant for the unusual or dreamy-eerie intro:

There is a dubby-metal thing going on at the start of these near-contemporaneous MTV faves by Guns N 'Roses and Def Leppard:

But this time around, though, not going to stick to rock, or even hand-played music.

The Drum and Bass Intro could be one of the worst things ever, especially during the Intelligent Era - every bleedin' track came with a long drawn antechamber of synth-pads and atmospheric flatus. Always for the same (excessive) number of bars too - such that you could look at the vinyl on the 12 inch and see how far it was before the track got going, the grooves looked different.

But there were killer ones too, proper tension builders, and others that walked a line between daft 'n' deadly:

(That is Japan's "Nightporter", that intro).

Many more from the world of dance to come I'm sure.

But for now, in closing, and before anybody else nabs it - from 2001, Osymyso's "Intro Inspection", a mash-up made of 101 intros....

Sunday, December 15, 2013

In the inaugural issue of The Pitchfork Review - the hitherto-online-only magazine's quarterly excursion into archaic ink-on-paper--you can find my essay "Worth Their Wait", a remembrance of the inkie music papers of the 1970s and 1980s. When they suggested the idea, I said to editor J.C. Gabel, "You do realise this could end up a right wallow in nostalgia?" In the event, it's part "Confessions of A Teenage NME Reader" and part cost-benefit analysis of the Analogue System versus the Digital System.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Like mince pies, ginger wine, brazil nuts and packets of dates, the Moon Wiring Club album is a seasonal occurrence. The crepuscular dank of Ian Hodgson's latest is always linked for me with that time of year when daylight hours shrivel and the chill creeps under your clothes into your bones.

A
Fondness For Fancy Hats is the latest emanation from the Blank Workshop. There are two formats, compact disc and cassette, with the latter bearing an extra title: Soft Confusion. In line with the governing audio-concept of "Edwardian Computer Games", the cassettes nestle inside the sort of plastic case that once upon a time housed certain videogames ("mainly BBC Micro ones", notes Ian, causing me to nod blankly, having not the slightest inkling whereof he speaks).

The Soft Confusion
version especially - which involved recording much of the CD onto
tape, mucking about with it, looping, weaving in game sounds
and ghost-flickers of earlier MWC tunes, until the end-product resembles a
"knacked-up" mixtape - is one of the best things he's done yet, I
think. Hear an excerpt:

At this point MWC possesses the most consistently on-it discography (and Fancy Hats is album #9, would you believe!) in the H-ological domain, nipping clear ahead of Ghost Box, Jon Brooks, Mordant, James Kirby, et al, who all have more stumbles to their name. (Only the Royal Wedding-timed Somewhere A Fox Is Getting Married failed to fully engage me, and perhaps revealingly, that one didn't come out in the winter).